Godot with gags: It’s Headed Straight Towards Us, at Park200, reviewed

It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight Towards Us is a mellow riot of a play. The setting is a rocky glacier in Iceland during the filming of a corny sci-fi movie. Hugh (Sam West) is a cerebral thesp who specialises in playing butlers and high-status toffs. On set, he meets his best friend from drama school, Gary (Rufus Hound), whose career has declined to the point where he’ll accept any role going. Tragic Gary used to be a star who earned a fortune as a cockney villain in the 1980s but he succumbed to alcoholism and ill discipline, and he now has little in common with Hugh who lives in London with a couple of pet dogs and a solicitous male lover. He’s horrified when Gary barges into his luxurious campervan and demands companionship and gallons of wine. But gradually the old pals start to bond as they gloat over the excesses and pratfalls of their former colleagues.

Hugh is fixated by Daniel Day-Lewis who, he says, ‘made 14 pairs of riding boots while filming The Last of the Mohicans’. Gary simmers with hostility towards the mothers of his many children and he convinces himself that the young runner (played by the excellent Nenda Neururer) is his long-lost daughter. The script is a lot smarter than it wants to admit. In truth, this is a symbolist drama that examines two halves of a single character. Hugh stands for circumspect intelligence, Gary for knee-jerk instinct.

The ancient binaries are beautifully revived in a crisp, witty script from Nigel Planer and Ade Edmondson. They end their story on a bleak note that calls to mind the most wretched depths of 20th-century existentialism.